Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (20 page)

Esther was right about one thing: The role of Michael was downsized as time went on. Feeding on the response of the viewers, the show’s writers increasingly put the spotlight on J. J. That was unfortunate for the show and for Ralph Carter. Esther stood up for his character, but because Ralph was a kid, he couldn’t do as much as the others to fight for stage time.

Making matters worse was that I was the outsider, the stand-up comic, the nonactor in a cast of veterans. During the first season the press was all about Esther and John. Beginning with the second season, however, I was the focus. All actors have egos, and theirs were bruised. At one point the producers stopped bringing all of my fan mail to the set so Esther and John wouldn’t get jealous of the thousands of pieces that would pour in every week to me, not them.

Neither of them ever confronted me face to face about their concerns. We never had a discussion about the situation. That was not surprising, because in all the time I was on the show Esther and John rarely ever said a word to me off the set about anything. It sounds crazy and impossible, but that is the truth. They talked to the other cast members, but not to me.

During rehearsals John would talk “about” me rather than to me. He just didn’t respect me and what I did as a comic. If I made a funny face, he would say to the director or the other actors, “Do we need to have actors mugging?” If I slipped in a joke in a sneak attack, he would say, “Do we really need that here?” I think he was trying to intimidate me, but I would not back off. He was the father figure on the set, but in reality I wasn’t that much younger than he was. J. J. was a teenager, seventeen years old when the show premiered, but Jimmie Walker was twenty-seven. John is only eight years older than me.

I have always admired John as an actor. He has put together a tremendous body of work, including what he did on
Good Times
. His later performances in
Roots
,
Coming to America
, and
The West Wing
were terrific. In 1975, while we were both in
Good Times
, we were also cast in the comedy
Let’s Do It Again
, starring Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby. But, appropriately, we were never in a scene together.

This sequel to
Uptown Saturday Night
was about a pair of blue-collar workers who fix a boxing match by using hypnotism on an unlikely fighter to win a big bet. Given my skinny body type, I was on Poitier’s radar for the role of boxer Bootney Farnsworth.

Poitier, who also directed the film, came to the Store to see me perform and afterward wanted to speak to me. But he ran into Landesberg instead.

“Is J. J. here?” he asked in that very soft voice of his.

Landesberg said, “His name is Jimmie, but I think he left.”

“I’m doing a movie and I would like J. J. to come in to talk to us.”

Landesberg phoned me. “I don’t believe it, man, but Sidney Poitier was at the Store looking for J. J. and wants to put you in a movie.”

I went to the office of the man, the black icon, who had starred in such great films as
In the Heat of the Night
and
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
and was the first black to win the Best Actor Oscar, for
Lilies of the Field.

“J. J., have you ever done movies?” he said.

“My name is Jimmie.” Then I told him about my
Badge 373
experience.

“But no major part in a movie?”

“No, but I can do it.”

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“That’s okay. I can do anything.” You have to have confidence!

Poitier put a director’s optical viewfinder up to his eye and stared at me from every angle.

“J. J., let me see if you are mad.”

I gave him my “angry.”

“Oh, J. J., much too big. Take it down.”

So I gave him a “less angry.”

“Now let me see you happy.”

I flashed him a big smile.

“Oh, J. J., much too big. Take it down.”

I did.

“Oh no, less. The camera is not TV. This is cinema.”

I smiled again, but less enthusiastically.

“Okay, I will direct you and then I will take it down even further.”

I had only a few lines in the film. I spent most of my time boxing. But always Poitier would want my reaction “not so big. We don’t want you to jump out of the screen.” And he always called me J. J.

Poitier and Cosby would have made a good pairing for an
Odd Couple
. Poitier was so under control, so prepared, so soft spoken. Cosby, however, would hold court. He walked in talking about his comedy and about his life, and he never stopped. If Cosby is not talking, nobody is talking. One phrase you will never hear from Cosby is “So what do
you
think?”

Poitier and his crew would be almost ready for a shot and suddenly Cosby would say, “I got an idea. Hey Sid, why don’t we change that so I come in from over here, you put this hat on and these glasses, and then that happens over there?”

A very calm Poitier would answer, “Bill, I already have the scene mapped. We have lighting. We have camera ready. A change would cause many problems.”

“Come on, just try it once. Sid! Just once!”

“Alright. We will try it.”

They would take another half-hour and make the changes. Then we would do the scene, and nine times out of ten that was the version of the scene that made the film. Cosby does pontificate. He does come down from the Mount with the tablets. But he has usually been right.

The film received good reviews and is still well thought of today. The rapper Notorious B.I.G. even took his alias, Biggie Smalls, from one of the characters. In an era of cheesy blaxploitation flicks,
Let’s Do It Again
was a solid comedy.

I was busy on other projects too, from working with my own writing staff and performing at the Store to making my Las Vegas debut opening for Petula Clark at the Riviera and starring in a TV movie.

The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened
was about a high school basketball player who learns he has leukemia before the state championship tournament. It was my first, and as it turned out, the only major dramatic role of my career. Talk about being fearless and plowing ahead. The man playing my father was James Earl Jones, probably best known at the time for
The Great White Hope
, for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

Landesberg commiserated with me about my insecurity about being able to hang in there with such an accomplished actor. “Did you know that when Laurence Olivier was going to do
Hamlet
, he felt he was not worthy?” he said dead serious. “I mean, how could he perform that role when the great Gabby Hayes had done it before? That’s right. Gabby Hayes was once a great English actor before he left the theater to become Hopalong Cassidy’s sidekick.”

Steve created the whole bit on the spot. He was terrific with dialects and impressions, and he had Olivier in his refined English accent asking crusty cowboy Gabby, “Why do you want to leave the London theater and go to the United States? You are the best Hamlet ever!”

“I got to be seen!” replied Gabby in his Western drawl. “I got to be seen!”

“But my good man, you are going to play a cowboy.”

“If I can play Hamlet,” answered Gabby, “I can play Buckshot!”

Steve’s bit helped me be a little less nervous when I went in for our first rehearsal.

But when James Earl Jones read his lines, he was completely monotone. No emotion at all. Boring. I was surprised. I thought this guy was supposed to be a great actor. A few rehearsals later he was doing the same thing. I told friends, “What’s the big deal about this James Earl Jones?” What a letdown, I thought to myself.

So I was feeling confident about a scene with him on the first day of shooting. Until he opened his mouth. He was excited, completely into the scene, and he nailed it. He was James Earl Jones. I was stunned, wondering where all of this energy came from. Not being an actor, I did not know that he—and many actors—rehearsed at a lower energy level. Once we were actually shooting, he was amazing!

The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened
—and even my performance—received very good reviews. I hear James Earl Jones continued with his career too.

I was also finally invited on to the
Tonight Show
, but Carson was not behind the desk. The guest host was none other than David Brenner, just like he said he would be years earlier. I saw him in the hallway of the studio and he said, “Hey, tonight we’re going to do that cab story. See you out there.” He broke out the cab joke he had concocted so long ago. I couldn’t believe he even remembered it.

To the credit of everyone on
Good Times
, despite the jibes in the press, we were always professional at work. A reporter for
TV Guide
wrote that during our second season, at the end of the scene in the Satan’s Knights episode in which J. J. was shot and laid on the sidewalk unconscious, James yelled, “Somebody call an ambulance!”

The director yelled, “Cut!”

Amos looked down at me and added, with feeling, “This’ll kill us in the Nielsens if he dies!”

But our cast did not have a familial relationship. Amos later told reporters that “although we played a family on the show, the cast was not really like a family. We would punch in and punch out like any other job.”

Norman would occasionally host dinner parties, but the entire cast never attended any of them. The Evans Family was a family of orphans. Looking back I think if we had the cast chemistry of a show like
The Jeffersons
, we could have run for a dozen years or more instead of the six that we did.

Of the original cast I got along very well with Ralph, though he was in school for much of the day. He was a cool kid. Bern Nadette was my only close friend, truly closer to me than my own sister. She helped me pick out gifts for girlfriends and hung out with me and my comedy buddies at Canter’s and Theodore’s. She went to the Comedy Store with us too.

“All you guys talk about is comedy! Comedy and jokes!” she rightly complained.

She was stunned at how visceral the conversations would be. George Miller would just rip people. “He doesn’t have any jokes,” he would say of another comic in that slow drawl of his. “That’s not funny.” Anything George said was funny, even the most biting cuts you ever heard. He said of comedy duos: “I love to see double acts break up. Then I can see them fail individually.” A typical joke of his:

I read this article that said your car reflects your personality. I don’t have a car.

Bern Nadette tried to get into how comedians are with each other and came to a couple of writers’ meetings. Finally, though, after I headed to the Store as usual to try the jokes out on stage, she said, “Stop! No more jokes!”

The attack piece in
Ebony
may have personally offended Lear more than me, because the article also slammed the show for not having enough black writers. No one outside of Norman Lear had done more to further the cause of blacks in the television industry, including behind the camera. Now, suddenly, according to some critics, Lear was running a plantation. After working so hard to make
Good Times
and other black shows happen, the backstabbing broke his heart. Beginning the day he came to the set with that article in hand, he never felt the same toward
Good Times
.

Beginning with that article I have rarely read anything about myself in print. Reading reviews is like an out-of-body experience, as if they are writing about another person. It is said that people believe 90 percent of what they read in a newspaper, but disagree with 90 percent of the 10 percent they think they know something about.

If someone writes something good in a review, they never get it exactly right, so it is not very useful. If it’s a bad review, you get upset, which does you no good either. Besides, there is really no reason to read a bad review—because you can count on someone coming up to you and telling you all about it anyway!

“Did you see that review about you? Called you an Uncle Tom! Said you were, and I think the quote was, ‘one of the worst things to ever happen to black people in the last thirty years.’ I don’t agree with that at all. Did you see that?”

“No, but I guess I don’t have to now.”

I suppose that is why I have never actually seen an episode of
Good Times
. I was there. I know what we did and what the show looked like. People told me all about every one of them—and still do. I know people enjoyed them—and still do—but I never had a reason to watch an episode.

Heading into our third season Amos and Rolle threatened to quit, so they were offered more money to stay. Esther quickly took it, but John hesitated. As he did, the writers came up with storylines about his character’s possible departure. That’s why John does not appear in two episodes of the third season. In one of them, Lou Gossett Jr. arrived as Florida’s brother Wilbert. If John bolted, Uncle Wilbert was in the wings to take over as the man in the Evans household. John agreed to return at the last minute.

For season three I was bumped up in the billing hierarchy with a new credit: “and Jimmie Walker as J. J.” on a single card. High school graduate J. J. now had a steady job (at first delivering chicken for the Chicken Shack and then for a rib joint) while attending art school at night. The storylines were as topical and incendiary as ever, including handguns in the home, slimy but smooth politicians, the high cost of medical care, adoption for an unwed mother, the disabled in society (a deaf friend), the numbers racket, lonely senior citizens, and community protests. Those were not even the most controversial.

In one episode J. J. and his girlfriend (played by Debbie Allen) decided to get married despite the objections of both sets of parents. They claimed to go to the prom but instead eloped. When she begins to get sick, J. J. discovers she is a heroin addict. When she loses her drugs, she runs away in search of another score.